Software

As you may know, Atom is an open-source, multi-platform text editor developed by GitHub, having a simple and intuitive graphical user interface and a bunch of interesting features for writing: CSS, HTML, JavaScript and other web programming languages. Among others, it has support for macros, auto-completion a split screen feature and it integrates with the file manager.

Not to be confused with the KDE Elisa music player written about just two weeks ago as a new alternative to Juk, Amarok, Cantata, and other KDE music/media player projects, the latest effort is called Babe.

Pithos 1.3.0 was released recently and is now available in its official PPA, for Ubuntu 17.04, 16.10 and 16.04. The new version brings support for MPRIS playlist and tracklist interfaces, improved accessibility UI, and more.

Folks, today we are going to show you about the fantastic website called Termbox where users can test/work almost six Operating systems through browser. It’s similar to Ubuntu online tour website which you might tried earlier. The main difference here is that offers only command line interface not for GUI.

Whoever wants to learn Linux without spending money & efforts (i mean no need to install Virtual Machine and Linux operating system on it) termbox is a right choice, only you should have a working internet connection that’s it. Also people who aren’t familiar with the command line to have a practice without damaging their own systems. This is the right place to kick start the Linux learning.

Ntfy is a simple yet serviceable cross-platform Python utility that enables you to automatically get desktop notifications on demand or when long running commands complete. It can as well send push notifications to your phone once a particular command completes.

Wireshark, the open-source and cross-platform network protocol analyzer designed for network analysis, troubleshooting, development and education purposes, was updated today, April 13, 2017, to version 2.2.6.

Wireshark remains the world's most popular network protocol analyzer and scanner software, used by millions of network administrators and hackers around the world, and Wireshark 2.2.6 is the sixth maintenance update to the stable series of the application, bringing more fixes for recently discovered security flaws.

GitHub's Andrea Liliana Griffiths is pleased to announce the release of Atom 1.16 as the latest stable version of the popular, multi-platform, and open-source hackable text editor, along with the Beta of Atom 1.17.

Atom 1.16 has entered Beta a little over a month ago when Atom 1.15 launched with its improvements to duplicate selections with multiple lines, the ability to retain tabs of deleted files, always visible cursors, better handling of minified files, and several other optimizations and bug fixes.

Making money from open-source software is not exactly a straightforward proposition, but the poster child for businesses based on open-source code is Red Hat.

The so-called "Red Hat model" involves charging customers a subscription for a business-ready version of its open-source Linux distribution. This gets customers a certified and maintained release with regular updates and security fixes.

Containers are an extremely mobile, safe and reproducible computing infrastructure that is now ready for production HPC computing. In particular, the freely available Singularity container framework has been designed specifically for HPC computing. The barrier to entry is low and the software is free.

At the recent Intel HPC Developer Conference, Gregory Kurtzer (Singularity project lead and LBNL staff member) and Krishna Muriki (Computer Systems Engineer at LBNL) provided a beginning and advanced tutorial on Singularity. One of Kurtzer’s key takeaways: “setting up workflows in under a day is commonplace with Singularity”.

A Linux version of Nylas Mail, the cross-plaform desktop e-mail client, is available for testing. The open-source app succeeds the old Nylas N1 client, which was discontinued last year. Since we last mentioned the app back in January a few things have changed.

Blender 2.79 is under development and it sounds like this release should be quite exciting for those into performance improvements or better OpenCL support.

With Blender 2.79, the OpenCL support has improved and should be closer to parity with Blender's CUDA capabilities. The OpenCL Cycles renderer has shorter render times by up to 50% in some cases, tiles are now seen updating while rendering, support for SSS and volume rendering, optimized transparent shadows, and various fixes.

GNOME Music 3.24.1.1 has just been released, a good time to reflect on what has happened last development cycle.

A goal for Music is to make it an exemplary application of GNOME/GTK+ Python programming and make it an entry-level project for new contributors. However the codebase was a mixture of coding styles and oversized multi-functional classes. Python is a powerful and easily accessible language, but the downside is that it can quickly get out of control if not some constraints are set on how to use it. So we started a rework to split up some of the bigger source files and enforce PEP-8 (code-style) & PEP-257 (docstrings) on new commits and bring existing code in line with it. We are not quite there yet on the clean-up front, but we have come a long way and going forward it is gonna get better.

Taskwarrior is a Free, Open Source, and powerful command line task manager that manages our TODO list in the well organized format, which automatically improve our productive. It is flexible, fast, and unobtrusive. It does its job then gets out of your way.

HandBrake is a tool for converting video from nearly any format to a selection of modern, widely supported codecs. HandBrake is an open-source, GPL-licensed, multiplatform, multithreaded video transcoder, DVD ripper, available for MacOS X, Linux and Windows. It is a versatile, easy-to-use tool for converting DVDs and other videos into H.264, MPEG-4, or OGG formatted media. It's particularly useful for making videos that are compatible with portable video devices such as the Apple iPod/iPhone.

Open Build Service from SuSE is web service building deb/rpm packages. It has recently been added to Debian, so finally there is relatively easy way to set up PPA style repositories in Debian. Relative as in "there is a learning curve, but nowhere near the complexity of replicating Debian's internal infrastructure". OBS will give you both repositories and build infrastructure with a clickety web UI and command line client (osc) to manage. See Hectors blog for quickstart instructions.

Astronomy is the branch of science that deals with the study of celestial objects such as stars, planets, moons, comets, asteroids, meteor showers, nebulae, star clusters, and galaxies. Astronomers observe the objects in the night sky to establish their composition and learn more about the origin and structure of the universe.

Astronomy is a very popular natural science. It’s not only for professional astronomers. The Hubble telescope has been providing superb images since 1990, inspiring more people around the world to take up astronomy as a hobby. There are so many fascinating pursuits to explore. For example, the search for the 9th planet in our solar system, and monitoring Asteroid 2014 JO25, due to fly by Earth on April 19 at a distance of about 1.1 million miles, are just a few current interests of mine.

One of those conundrums is the fact that I spend a huge amount of my time promoting and advocating free and open-source software. Yet in order to reach a large audience with that advocacy, I end up needing to use social networks (such as Twitter and Google Plus) which are—not free software.

If I'm going to be speaking at a conference about GNU, Linux and other free software-y topics, I announce it on Twitter. And, perhaps rightly so, my freedom-loving friends toss a little (usually good-natured) mockery my way for doing so.

More screenshots of Firefox’s Photon redesign have surfaced online. The new screenshots continue to reveal more details about the upcoming redesign, including the purpose of the library button, the behaviour of side panels, and the new-look main menu.

The concise list of changes is available in the changelog. In the following we describe the most important new features in more details.

Beginning with the previous release, LabPlot is available for the Windows platform. Now we further extend the support for different operating systems and starting with this release LabPlot will be available for Mac OS X, too. We’re providing a Mac OS X bundle in our download section.

MimeKit 1.14 released [Ed: Jeffrey Stedfast is spreading Microsoft infections into GNU/Linux. Is he working for Microsoft along with Xamarin people?]

Development of the Vivaldi 1.9 web browser kicked off at the end of this week with the release of the first snapshot, versioned 1.9.804.3, for all supported operating systems.

Vivaldi Snapshot 1.9.804.3 has over 40 changes, most of which are bug fixes for various regressions from the stable Vivaldi 1.8 series of the cross-platform web browser, but it also brings two new features, such as the ability to shuffle the order of installed extensions and to change the folder where screen captures are stored.

There are many audio players available for Linux and you may be using your favorite one and might ask why so many audio players, but there is no harm to try new stuff, you may consider it. Museeks a cross-platform, open-source audio player is around since last year (2016) and it is doing great. It is available for Linux, Windows and Mac; written in Node.js, Electron, Flux with Redux and React.js languages and released under MIT license.

Have you ever been in a situation when you want to reset your Ubuntu/Linux Mint to default but you can't? The only way used to get default is do the complete new installation but now there is an App claims to do factory reset of your Ubuntu/Linux Mint, called Resetter.

While Japanese companies have doubled down on open source software collaboration, including in new areas such as auto, Chinese firms have been slower to embrace it, which risks isolating projects from a key emerging technology centre

One of the most important lessons I was taught growing up is to say “thank you” when someone does something nice for you. Many months ago, someone first introduced me to something called Happiness Packets. The idea is simple but powerfully effective. Happiness Packets are like thank-you cards for open source users or contributors. You can send a packet to anyone for anything. Your message can be as short or as long as you like. You can put your name on your message or you can keep it totally anonymous. The choice is yours. And now, I want to challenge you to the #HappinessPacketChallenge!

The last few weeks have been an amazing ride for the Meson project. We
have gone from "interesting but niche" to being seriously considered
for such core infrastructure projects as Mesa, Wayland, Xorg and even
systemd. I would like to thank everyone who has contributed in making
this possible. Thanks to all contributors, evangelists, those who have
converted their projects, or even proposed it. We would not be here
without you.

However having this much growth brings with it new problems. The main
one of these, as most of you have probably noticed, is the growth in
pull request backlog. I know there are MRs that have been waiting for
quite a while and that this is very frustrating to those people who
have filed them. My apologies to you, we are trying to make this
better.

The list of new features coming in PostgreSQL 10 is extremely impressive. I've been involved in the PostgreSQL project since the 8.4 release cycle (2008-2009), and I've never seen anything like this. Many people have already blogged about these features elsewhere; my purpose here is just to bring together a list of the features that, in my opinion, are the biggest new things that we can expect to see in PostgreSQL 10. [Disclaimers: (1) Other people may have different opinions. (2) It is not impossible that some patches could be reverted prior to release. (3) The list below represents the work of the entire PostgreSQL community, not specifically me or EnterpriseDB, and I have no intention of taking credit for anyone else's work.]

Today, Olivier Crête, libnice maintainer and Collabora Multimedia Lead, announced the availability of libnice 0.1.14, the latest release of the NAT traversal library implementing the RFC for Interactive Connectivity Establishment (ICE). ICE is a key part of the WebRTC standard and libnice is used by many WebRTC implementations such as OpenWebRTC, Kurento and Janus.

Forked from Livestreamer, which is no longer maintained, Streamlink is a command line tool (and API) that can be used to stream videos from various streaming services, such as Twitch, YouTube Live and many more, and play them using your favorite video player, be it VLC, mpv, and more.

Developed by Tony George, who's also behind other fairly popular applications such as Selene Media Converter, TimeShift backup tool, and more, Polo is only available for users who donate for now. The stable release will be available for all users, however, those who donate will get a few extra features.

This article accompanies our big list of GNU/Linux & FLOSS RSS feeds so you can choose suitable reader for your desktop. Here I list Firefox, Thunderbird, Akregator, Liferea, Blam, and Evolution with some details of each. It's possible later for me to update this list, because there are still many other good readers. I hope you enjoy this!

The most common mistake we often do is “I don’t need to take notes. I will remember it”. Isn’t it? Indeed, it is. I am not an exception too. I have done this mistake so many times. Not anymore! Today, I found an useful command line TODO task manager application called “Taskwarrior”. It is a free and Open Source utility that manages your TODO list from the command line. It is efficient, flexible, fast, and unobtrusive tool. You can add all sorts of tasks, such as daily, weekly, monthly chores, personal goals, official-related works, family events, and manage them like a pro from the command line.

Publican is a DocBook publication system, not just a DocBook processing tool. As well as ensuring your DocBook XML is valid, publican works to ensure your XML is up to publishable standard.

Because upstream depreached FOP support and prefers wkhtmltopdf, this version comes without FOP package dependencies. If you want to use FOP, then deinstall wkhtmltopdf. After the next start publican will use FOP again.

Last week we had a work week at Mozilla’s Toronto office for a bunch of different projects including Quantum DOM, Quantum Flow (performance), etc. It was great to have people from a variety of teams participate in discussions and solidify (and change!) plans for upcoming Firefox releases. There were lots of sessions going on in parallel and I wasn’t able to attend them all but some of the results were written up by the inimitable Ehsan in his fourth Quantum Flow newsletter.

The Document Foundation (TDF) releases LibreOffice 5.3.2, the 2nd minor release of the LibreOffice 5.3 family, focused on bleeding edge features, and as such targeted at technology enthusiasts, early adopters, and power users. LibreOffice 5.3.2 integrates over 50 patches, with a large number of fixes related to RTF and DOCX documents.

GNU/Linux in Ataribox

In June, Atari declared itself "back in the hardware business" with the announcement of the Ataribox—a retro-styled PC tech-based console. One month later it emerged Atari plans to crowdfund the project, and now we have some hard facts on cost, and what's under its hood.
Speaking to VentureBeat, the Ataribox creator and general manager Feargal Mac says an Indiegogo funding campaign will launch this year, and that the final product will ship in spring of 2018. When it does, it'll cost between $250—$300 and will boast an AMD custom processor with Radeon graphics.

SUSE on Storage

Cloud, big data and Internet of Things are all contributing to a data explosion in the enterprise – and traditional storage systems are simply unable to manage the load while providing acceptable performance levels.
Software-defined storage (SDS), where enterprise storage hardware and software are decoupled, is the logical next step in the move to a software-defined data centre.